Chloroplast
/ˈklɔːrəplæst/noun
The organelle inside a plant cell where photosynthesis happens.
The Greek roots
Literally: “green moulded body”
The story of the word
χλωρός covers the yellow-green of new shoots and of pale honey rather than the deep green English hears in it, and the gas chlorine was named from the same colour word. Andreas Schimper named the chloroplast in the 1880s, pairing that colour with πλαστός, moulded, the element behind plastic and protoplasm. Schimper also proposed what turned out to be true: the chloroplast is a cyanobacterium swallowed long ago and never digested.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Under the microscope the chloroplasts drift around the cell wall in a slow circuit.
Chloroplasts carry their own DNA, inherited from the mother plant alone.